The Hatching: A Novel (3 page)

Two-Two’s passenger, an undershirt-wearing dipshit with a shaved head who looked like he was barely twenty, came out firing a handgun. Mike wasn’t even sure he heard the bang of the man’s pistol, but he heard the
plink
of a bullet hitting the door of the car, heard the glass of the windshield shattering. He heard a grunt, and then the heavy drop of Leshaun’s body hitting the ground. All this before Two-Two even got out of the truck.

Mike’s mind went blank, and he watched the man from the passenger side of the truck pop the emptied magazine out of his gun, reach into the pocket of his baggy pants, and pull out another clip. Meanwhile, Two-Two’s door opened, and Mike saw that he was also carrying a pistol. Two men, two guns, Leshaun hit, though Mike didn’t know how bad, and he hadn’t even pulled his own gun out yet. He knew he was supposed to be doing some
thing, but he was just standing there as if he didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what to do.

And then he did.

He put the kid on the passenger side down first. Three shots clustered in his chest. Two-Two and his buddy weren’t wearing vests. He’d heard some of the agents who were gun nerds bitching about the stopping power of the service-issued Glock 22, but judging by the way the kid went down like a bag of chicken parts, the .40 cartridges seemed to work just fine. He’d never actually shot anybody before, had fired his gun only once in the line of duty—it had been one bullet, one time, barely a year on the job, and he’d missed—and he was surprised at how easy and normal it felt. All three bullets went home, and as the kid left his feet, Mike pivoted so that he could aim at Two-Two.

Two-Two had the same idea, though, and Two-Two was pointing back.

Mike wasn’t sure who fired first, or if they fired at the same time, because the push of the pistol in his hand was matched by a tug on his sleeve. But he was entirely sure whose aim was better. Two-Two’s head snapped back in a mist of blood. When Mike looked at his arm, there was a hole in the sleeve of his T-shirt, but not in his flesh.

The kid from the passenger side wasn’t moving, and neither was Two-Two. Mike holstered his gun and hustled around the car to check on Leshaun. There were two holes in Leshaun’s shirt: one hole a bloody mess on his upper arm, the other on the chest, clean and clear, the vest doing its job. Leshaun’s eyes were open, and Mike had never been happier to see that big black motherfucker staring at him, but as he called for help he realized he was also going to have to call his ex-wife again.

He was going to be really, really late.

I
t didn’t matter what Dr. Basu did; the numbers kept coming back strange. She had rebooted her computer twice, even called Nadal in New Delhi and made him manually check the sensor in the basement of his building, but she kept getting the same results: something was shaking New Delhi with a consistency that was puzzling. Whatever it was, Dr. Basu thought, it wasn’t an earthquake. At least, it didn’t act like an earthquake.

“Faiz,” she called. “Can you please check this for me?”

Faiz wasn’t exactly quick to respond. He’d gone to Germany the previous month for a conference and had apparently spent most of his time in Düsseldorf in the hotel room of an Italian seismologist. Her colleague’s focus, since coming back, was on e-mailing dirty pictures back and forth with his new girlfriend and trying to find employment in Italy.

Dr. Basu sighed. She wasn’t used to such behavior from Faiz. He was funny and charming, but also sloppy and inappropriate and in many ways a horrible man—he had showed her some of the
photos the Italian woman had sent him, photos that Dr. Basu was sure were not meant for sharing—but he was also good at his job. “Faiz,” she said again. “Something’s going on.”

He banged his keyboard with a flourish and then pushed his heels against the ground, sending his chair wheeling across the concrete floor. “Yes, boss.” He knew she hated when he called her that. He looked at her screen and then ran his fingers across the monitor, even though he knew she hated that too. “Yeah,” he said. “Looks weird. Too steady. Try rebooting.”

“I did. Twice.”

“Call New Delhi and get somebody to check the sensors. Maybe reboot those too.”

“I already did,” Dr. Basu said. “The data is accurate, but it doesn’t make any sense.”

Faiz took a toffee from the bowl of candy she kept next to her computer. He started unwrapping the cellophane. “Ines said she might be able to come visit the last week in May. I’m going to need that week off, boss, okay?”

“Faiz,” she said. “Concentrate.”

“It’s hard to concentrate knowing that Ines could be here next month. We aren’t going to leave my apartment. She’s Italian, which means she’s extra sensual, you know?”

“Yes, Faiz, I know. And why do I know? Because you keep telling me exactly how ‘sensual’ she is. Has it ever occurred to you that I might want to spend my time focusing on data rather than on the way your new girlfriend likes to—”

“She’s never been to India before,” Faiz interrupted. “We aren’t going to do anything touristy, though. A week in the bedroom, if you know what I mean.”

“It’s impossible not to know what you mean, Faiz. You are a man who has never encountered subtlety, and if I were not such a
wonderful and understanding person, I would have you fired and possibly imprisoned. Now, please concentrate,” she said.

He looked at the numbers again. “It’s low and strong, but whatever it is, it isn’t an earthquake. Too steady.”

“I know it’s not an earthquake,” Dr. Basu said. She was trying not to lose her temper. She knew there was something she wasn’t seeing, and while Faiz might be acting like a lovesick fool, he really was a remarkable scientist. “But let’s concentrate on what it is, not what it isn’t.”

“Whatever it is, it’s building,” Faiz said.

“What?” Dr. Basu looked at the monitor, but she didn’t see anything that stood out. The rumbles were all low. Nothing that really would have worried her if it had been something singular. It was the regularity, the pattern, that left her feeling as if something was wrong.

“Here,” Faiz said, touching the screen and leaving a smear. “And here, and here. See how there’s a rhythm to it, but every tenth one’s a little bigger.”

Dr. Basu scrolled to the beginning of the pattern and then counted. She frowned, jotted down some numbers, and then chewed on the end of the pen. It was a habit she’d developed in graduate school and one that, despite having more than a few pens break in her mouth, she’d yet to kick. “They stay bigger.”

“No, it’s only on the tenth rumble that they get big.”

“No, Faiz, look.” Dr. Basu handed him the pad of paper and then pointed at the computer screen. “See?”

Faiz shook his head. “Nope.”

“This is why I’m in charge and you have to get the coffee,” she said, taking some comfort in Faiz’s slow chuckle. She clicked the mouse and isolated the points, then drew a line to plot the changes. “Here. Every tenth event it amplifies, and though it doesn’t keep
the entirety of the amplification, each set of nine that follows is slightly stronger than the previous set, until, again, the tenth.”

Faiz leaned back in his chair. “You’re right. I missed that. If it keeps up, though, keeps growing like that, we’re going to start getting complaints from New Delhi. They won’t be able to feel it yet, but sooner or later somebody is going to call us and ask what’s going on.” Faiz lifted his glasses and perched them on top of his head. He thought it made him look smart. Ditto stroking his beard, which he did as he mused, “Hmmm, every tenth one.”

Dr. Basu took the pen from her mouth. “But what’s it mean?” She tapped the end of the pen on the desk and then spun the pen away from her. “Drilling?”

“No. Wrong pattern.”

“I know, but sometimes it’s just good to get confirmation that I’m as smart as I think I am.”

Faiz snatched her pen from the desk and started flipping it. One rotation. Two rotations. Three rotations. On the fourth he fumbled it and had to reach under his chair to pick it up. His voice came out a little muffled. “Maybe the military?”

“Maybe,” Dr. Basu said, but it was clear to both of them she didn’t really believe that either. “Any other ideas?” she asked Faiz, because she had none of her own.

“S
piders,” Professor Melanie Guyer said. She clapped her hands, hoping the sound would carry to the top of the auditorium where at least one student appeared to be sleeping. “Come on, guys. The answer in this class is always going to be spiders. And yes, they do molt,” she said, pointing to the young woman who had asked the original question. “But no, they aren’t really that similar to cicadas. For one thing, spiders don’t hibernate. Well, not that cicadas exactly hibernate.”

Melanie glanced out the window. She wasn’t about to admit to the class that she found cicadas creepy. One time she had a bat get stuck in her hair while she was looking for a rare beetle in a cave in Tanzania, and another time, in Ghana, she accidentally stepped into a nest of western bush vipers. She’d gotten stung by a tarantula hawk wasp in Southeast Asia, which she thought was the most painful thing there was until she got bitten by a bullet ant in Costa Rica—that felt like having a nail gun fired into her elbow followed by a dunk in acid—but none of that really scared her like cicadas did. Oh, cicadas. The clicking sound from their tymbals, the ones with the red eyes, the way they swarmed and fell from trees and
littered the sidewalks. And the crunching. Jesus. The crunching. The live ones underfoot, the discarded exoskeletons. Worse, the sheer number of them. Predator satiation was brilliant from an evolutionary perspective: all the cicadas had to do was breed in such numbers that anything that fed on them just got full. The survivors got on with their business. And then, after a few weeks, they died out, and there was just a graveyard of husks, which was also totally creepy. Thank all fucking everything that she was going to have another decade or so before Washington had its next big swarm of cicadas. She was going to have to plan a vacation. It wasn’t really an option for a biologist who specialized in the use of spider venom for medicinal purposes to admit to being so afraid of cicadas that she couldn’t go outside when they were swarming.

“But we aren’t talking about cicadas,” Melanie said, realizing that she’d drifted off. “We’re talking about spiders. Even though spiders seem to scare the hell out of people, there’s really almost no reason for that. At least not in North America. Australia’s a different matter. Everything in Australia is dangerous, not just the crocodiles.” She got a low chuckle from the class. In Melanie’s book, a low chuckle near the end of a two-hour morning lecture with fewer than three weeks left in the semester was a victory.

She looked at her watch. “Okay, so for Wednesday, pages two twelve to two forty-five. Again, please note that this is a change from the syllabus. And to that we say,” Melanie held her arms up and conducted the class as they said it along with her, “don’t let the bedbugs bite.” She watched the undergraduates shuffle out of the auditorium. Some of them looked a little dazed, and she couldn’t tell if it was because of the early start time of the class or if she’d been droning again. She was a world-class researcher, perhaps one of the best at what she did, but even though she’d been working at it, lecturing was not her strong suit. She’d been trying
to make her teaching more dynamic, throwing in jokes like the one about Australia, but there was only so much she could do for a three hundred-level course. Mostly she just hunkered down in her lab and dealt with graduate students, but part of the deal she’d struck with American University was that every second year she’d also teach a lecture class for undergraduates. She hated tearing herself away from her research, but if the price of a full lab, research assistants, and a team of funded graduate students working under her direction was that every two years she had to tell a class of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds that the spiders that stowed along in banana shipments were rarely dangerous, she’d live.

She looked down at the screen of her tablet, which mirrored the pictures on the screen at the front of the room. She had a soft spot for the
Heteropoda venatoria
, the huntsman spider. Partly it was because she’d had her first huge research breakthrough—the kind that made her what passed for famous in her field and got her this appointment and the subsequent grants and funding that kept the whole thing humming—working with
Heteropoda venatoria
, but if she was being honest, it was also because the first time she’d encountered a huntsman spider, her first year of college, her professor, in his thick accent, had described the spider as having a “moo-stache.” Melanie liked the fact that there were spiders out there in the world with mustaches. In grad school, she’d dressed as a
Heteropoda venatoria
for Halloween and it had gone over well with her friends who were also working on their doctorates. Nobody else had gotten the joke, though. Most people thought she was trying to be a tarantula or something and couldn’t figure out the mustache. She’d given up on spider costumes two years ago at a Halloween party, when she’d overheard somebody referring to her as “the black widow.” The joke, if it was a joke, hit home, because the truth was, despite her husband’s job—her
ex
-husband’s job—she
was the one who hadn’t been available to Manny, who had spent so much time in the lab that their marriage foundered.

She shut off the projector, slipped her tablet into her purse, and headed out of the classroom. As she opened the door she decided to stop on the way back to the lab and pick up a salad. Something fresher than the sandwiches she usually got from the vending machines in the basement of her building. You could taste the preservatives with every bite. Actually, Melanie thought, it was probably just as well that the sandwiches were loaded with preservatives, because she wasn’t sure anybody other than her ever ate them. They needed to last awhile in the machine. Even her most dogged graduate students either brought their meals from home or took the extra five minutes to walk across the quad to get something that didn’t have to be purchased with a fistful of quarters. Speaking of dogged graduate students . . . She came to a halt as the door closed behind her.